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I’m afraid I’m already past the point where, if someone in this administration accidentally told the truth, I wouldn’t believe it. I actually don’t want to be that person who can no longer believe the sky is blue because I’m so used to Trumpty Numpty and his handlers calling it every color except blue, but the political situation is turning me into that person.

Dave at We Hunted the Mammoth shows us this adorable idea from some guy at Reddit who thinks women will soon resort to offering threesomes to get men’s attention. This is really…special.

Women used to maintain a pussy cartel. To get any pussy you had to get married. Men want pussy so they got married. The cartel broke down a bit and women started giving access to pussy after engagement. Then the effort was lowered some more and the couple only had to be “going steady”. Next was “in a committed relationship” and eventually the “3 date rule”. Today you just swipe right on a smartphone.

Women currently sell into a hyper-competitive sex market where once they were buyers with a huge upper hand. The market is flooded and prices have dropped to $0.00. Gone are the days where they could demand any sort of commitment in exchange for access. Women still want men so they provide extra services to the men to compete for attention. Naked pics are extra services they use to keep up with the many women competing for the man they want. Either they send the pics or the guy moves on to the women who will.

I think the next major innovation will be women grouping together to offer threesomes to men in exchange for attention. Once naked pics become normalized they will have to do something. This is the next logical step.

Has it ever occurred to this cupcake that maybe, just maybe, the reason why “the price of pussy dropped” is that women were actually not so interested in long-term heterosexual monogamy? Like, maybe it was the other way around all that time? Maybe women appeared to be so interested in marriage because we kind of had to have husbands in order to get laid and not have to constantly lie about it? As soon as reliable birth control and increasingly permissive social attitudes made it okay for a girl to get some action without commitment, women became the ones who were less interested in marriage.

This kid (along with a whole lot of other Red Pill types) is somehow convinced that women are “giving away” sex because we want something else that men have to offer that they don’t currently give away for free. Does he think we want more of men’s attention? Seriously? Most of us would actually prefer to get less of that. These same guys act like women are degrading themselves by pursuing and enjoying casual sex, while said guys also make a part-time job of trying to manipulate us into giving them more access to our pussies, but, honestly, the sad truth of the matter is that women aren’t using sex as currency. We’re really not. If you can’t imagine why a woman would want to fuck you unless she’s trying to get something else, I guess that means you’re lousy in bed. Try being less lousy in bed.

If a woman’s acting like she really just wants a quick roll in the hay with some cute guy on Tinder, it’s probably because she really just wants a quick roll in the hay. He has nothing to offer her except a decent-looking bod with a healthy cock, and even that much, she might not want for more than one night.

As for threesomes…have you ever considered that if you happen to be in bed with two women at the same time, they’ll be there for each other just as much as for you? And that’s where you should be trying to be less lousy in bed. If you’re lucky enough to be in bed with two ladies at the same time, you don’t want them to ignore you.

According to Murphy, “the central tenement of feminism is equality for human beings regardless of sex, gender, orientation, race, religion,” and that concept should extend to unborn children. “To devalue the preborn life simply because of their location or of their dependency is an act of discrimination,” she said. “In what good society does improving one side of human rights involve harming and causing violence to other human beings?”

The word you want is “tenet,” not “tenement,” for fuck’s sake.

This type of argumentation is what I call “cargo cult social justice.” It’s where regressive social movements—and opposition to legal abortion is absolutely regressive—appropriate the language of progressive movements and think it works the same way. Ms. Murphy’s use of social-justice-derived language to support the cause of forcing women to have babies is especially transparent, but she’s far from alone in this.

I am very worried about college campuses saying that a woman and a man—or two men or two women, but I talk right now about women and men—can be in bed together, Diane, and at one time, naked, and at one time he or she, most of the time they think she, can say “I changed my mind.”

No such thing is possible. In the Talmud, in the Jewish tradition, it says when that part of the male anatomy is aroused and there’s an erection, the brain flies out of that and we have to take that very seriously, so I don’t agree with that.

You cannot comprehend the size of the Fuck I Do Not Give about what the Talmud says about arousal and sexual consent. If that is indeed what the Talmud tells us about consent, then the Talmud can fuck itself with a frozen pineapple.

I’m saying people who think about when they want to go and have a sexual experience to make sure they’re protected from sexually transmitted diseases and unintended pregnancies and that they cannot say at one time at the height of arousal just when he is very aroused, strong erection, when she’s very aroused, either he or she cannot change their mind.

I know it’s controversial. But I have to stand up and believe for what I believe in. I know it has something to do with Title IX, the money that goes to universities. I’m very worried about that. And people like you and me, who have this power, especially you right now on NPR, of the airwaves, do have to talk about that.

People like Dr. Ruth who have this power, do have a responsibility NOT to blame victims and apologize for rapists while millions of people are listening.

She actually says, in so many words: “The idea of consent is nonsense. Except consent before they are naked in bed.”

No. No. No no no, Doctor, how many times must I say NO before you understand? “Consent is nonsense”? And if you think for one misbegotten moment that you are so very brave and revolutionary for complaining about universities encouraging their students not to rape each other, you can just forget about having any credibility on matters of sexuality for the rest of your natural life. I don’t want your advice, and I don’t want your book!

Okay. That’s out of my system.

It is possible for two (or more!) people to get naked in bed together and have some intimate interactions, but not others. It’s possible for them to say out loud what they want to do, and for that not to include penetration! It’s possible for either or both parties to change their mind partway into the process! Is it frustrating, disappointing and annoying to get all hot and bothered and then have your partner change their mind? I’m sure it can be frustrating. But if your brain flies out of your erogenous zones the moment you get aroused, then you should not be allowed to run loose. Deal with your frustration like an adult member of society. Failure to respect your partner’s change of mind is rape. Don’t do that.

#BlameOneNotAll is a tag that begs to be derailed, so I joined in the fun this afternoon. Soon enough, this reply appeared in my interactions.

My Tweet says: “#BlameOneNotAll because all these acts of violence on women are totally unrelated. Nope, just one isolated incident after another.” I’ve blurred out the profile pic and username of the person who replied to me. Their response is: “Yeah, like female teachers molesting young boys. Coincidences, surely.”

No, I didn’t engage with this user. I can think of about 100 things I’d rather do with my time—pull my toenails off with pliers, for instance—than get sucked into an argument with an anti-feminist. Nope, this exemplary character kept on popping into my mentions, and I kept on Tweeting.

I’m just showing off this one reply as an example of how some of us have different reasons for doing what we do.

Some of us do talk about sexual violence with male victims and female perpetrators, as it comes up. Maybe not as often as we should! But when we talk about it, we do so because we see female-on-male violence as part of the same system that enables male-on-female (and male-on-male, etc.) violence. We talk about it because we care about men and boys as our fellow human beings and we value their vulnerabilities. We sometimes ask, “But seriously, what about the men?” without irony, because bodily autonomy matters for everyone or it matters not at all. We object to abuses such as female teachers and other authority figures molesting boys because all children should grow up free of abuse.

And then some people bring up male victims with female assailants as a dishonest “Gotcha!” tactic on feminists. It’s all a question of priorities.

I am an author where much of my work utilizes profanity. Because fuck yeah, profanity. Profanity is a circus of language. It’s a drunken trapeze act. It’s clowns on fire. And let’s be clear up front: profanity is not separate from language. It is not lazy language. It is language. Just another part of it. Vulgarity has merit. It is expressive. It is emotive. It is metaphor.

Yes. I agree with this. Profanity is language. We’re talking about actual words that real people use in their daily lives to communicate their ideas. The dividing line between supposedly clean language and filthy language is strictly arbitrary. If you read a book that was written with words like shit, fuck, bitch, ass, hell, damn, cunt, and cocksucker present, but read it with those words switched out with other, supposedly kid-friendly words, you lose a certain amount of expression, emotion, metaphor and characterization from the content. The book tends not to be as effective with the profanity taken out.

That said, I don’t really have an opinion on whether this app is or should be legal. I’m not interested in talking about whether it’s morally wrong for someone to sell this app, or use it. I think this thing is completely fucking ridiculous, and if you think you’d enjoy my books (for example) more with the f-bombs taken out, I don’t think you’d really enjoy my books either way. I’ll show you a screencap from Clean Reader’s blog that gives a good example of the absurdity of focusing on profanity:

“BUY THE GAME OF THRONES BOOKS AND READ THEM WITHOUT THE SWEAR WORDS.”

If you’re having trouble reading the text on that image, this is what it says:

“Game of Thrones 5 book bundle is on sale for the next 5 hours. Only $19.99 for the series. That’s 50% off the normal price. Act fast before the sale ends! And read it with Clean Reader so you won’t have to read any of the swear words in the series!”

If you’re thinking you’ve been wanting to read the A Song of Ice and Fire novels, except they have so much nasty language, you should probably ask yourself what it is, exactly, that bothers you so much about those monosyllabic words.

By all means, let’s read about people killing each other! Here’s a guy getting his head cut off in front of a crowd that includes his own daughters! Here’s another guy who lets his guards gang-rape his teenage son’s wife while the son watches, and then forces the son to participate! Here’s a woman and her teenage son being murdered at her brother’s wedding! Here’s a guy whose penis was chopped off and sent in a box to his father! Here’s a grown man chucking a defenseless little boy out of a high window because the boy saw him fooling around with his twin sister! (Would it bother you more if I wrote “fucking” instead of “fooling around with”?) Here’s a woman who likes to burn people alive! Here’s an old man who’s been sexually abusing his daughters for decades, and sacrifices his newborn sons to the Army of the Undead! Look at this teenage king who orders his bodyguard to beat up a defenseless girl! Here’s a mentally handicapped woman who was gang-raped during a riot! Look, here’s a woman trying to throw her niece to her death because she thinks the girl is fooling around with the aunt’s new husband! And now the husband chucks his wife to her death, without even giving her niece a chance to leave the room! Here’s a young woman being forced to fight a fully grown bear with a blunt sword and no armor! She bit a man’s ear off earlier that day because he tried to rape her.

You want to read about all those horrible things, but you don’t want to see the word CUNT on the page? Think about that for a while. Ask yourself why that is.

Yeah, I’ve been quiet lately, but I’m not dead. Tauriq Moosa has brought us the news that Scott Adams, known sock-puppeteer, is still talking, this time about street harassment. He still hasn’t learned anything.

There’s the initial bout of condescension towards feminists and feminist-sympathizers, which is especially rich coming from this guy because let me remind you: known sock-puppeteer. He seems to think that feminists don’t know how our movement is received by men, and therefore his opinion will be valuable to us.

Okay, so, quick note to any male readers who might be new (to this blog, to feminist discussion in general) around here: if it seems like feminist activism is insufficiently responsive to men’s objections, or insufficiently sensitive to men’s feelings, or just generally not saying what men think should be said, it’s not because we don’t hear you. Trust me, we hear you. We hear you much better than you hear us. We have different priorities. If our priorities were in line with men’s priorities, we wouldn’t be feminists.

With that in mind, his whole post is worthless before it begins. He’s giving us his take on the recent (infamous) street harassment video by Hollaback, in which a young white or white-passing woman walks through the streets of New York, mostly Harlem, and gets tons of unsolicited, inappropriate, sometimes threatening attention. (If you don’t already know which one I’m talking about, put “Hollaback video Shoshana B. Roberts” into a Google search. You probably already know it.) He looks at this video, first complains that it’s deceptively edited, and then starts screaming at all us uppity females to move somewhere else. Yeah, that’s what he says. Over and over. There’s a bit of concern-trolling about racism and classism, but mostly he’s just screaming at us to move out of wherever we’re experiencing street harassment now. Here are some edited highlights:

MOVE!!! JUST FUCKING MOVE!!!

Okay, I know, your family lives in New York City and your job is there and….JUST FUCKING MOVE!!! MOVE!!! STOP MAKING IT MY PROBLEM!!!

[The video] makes women look like idiots for living in such a place voluntarily.

The creepy stalker guys were just scary. MOVE!!! MOVE!!! MOVE!!!

Mr. Certified Genius Adams’s angle is that he’s telling us feminists how to handle our message to make it more appealing to men, and if he’s thinking that way, this reaction to the issue of street harassment is probably not unique. There are a lot of reasons why this advice is unhelpful, such as a) There are some careers that are impossible to pursue outside of New York and Los Angeles, b) There’s basically no such thing as a safe neighborhood for women, c) The men who appear in that video are probably much more aggressive towards black and brown women who live in their neighborhoods full time, d) Moving somewhere else is fucking expensive and risky, often prohibitively so, e) Therefore, the women who are likely getting the most egregious harassment are the ones who can least afford to move and have the most limited options for other places to live, and f) Wait a minute, why is it that the women have to move? Women are not the problem here.

There are all those issues, and now I want to add that Scott Adams, and anyone else who thinks the solution to street harassment is for women to go live somewhere else, isn’t really serious about that. They don’t want us to move out of the cities. Even if there are some places where women can live and work without harassment (which…no, honestly, there aren’t), nobody actually wants us to follow this advice. If all the women currently experiencing street harassment in New York City cut their losses and moved out to the Land of Safe Streets, that would be a very serious problem for NYC, and nobody wants that to happen. Nobody wants New York, or LA, or DC, or San Francisco, or Chicago, or anywhere else where creepy stalker guys exist (which is…everywhere that humans live) to become a sausagefest. A city without women is an unsustainable city. Demographic devastation is not the answer to street harassment.

They don’t want us to move somewhere safer. They want us to shut up and pretend there’s no problem.

PZ Myers picked up this…humorous…new meme, but I refuse to put another copy of the unaltered image into Google, so I’ve done my part with it:

Original meme shows compact car hitting female pedestrian on roadway. Text was: “FEMINIST LOGIC”“Don’t tell me when to cross the street. Teach drivers not to hit people.”I have super-imposed new text: “ARE YOU FUCKING SHITTING ME? DO YOU THINK RAPE IS JUST LIKE AN ACCIDENTAL COLLISION? WHO ACTUALLY THINKS THIS WAY? WHO?”

Short version: there is no universe in which this analogy is not completely fucking inappropriate in every possible way. This is another one of those analogies that say more about how anti-feminists think of men than about how feminists think of women.

As PZ points out right away, we actually DO have a system of education aimed at preventing motorists from running over pedestrians. Some countries might be more lax than others about enforcement, but here in the US, you need a license to drive. You can be criminally prosecuted for driving without a license. Part of the licensing process is demonstrating that you know how to watch out for pedestrians. Not everyone has the right to drive a car. Some people are not eligible for driver’s licensing because they do not meet the conditions for operating a motor vehicle without putting lives in danger.

Miri at Brute Reason has a guest post from CaitieCat, in which she asks us liberal heathens not to harp on spelling and grammar in place of meaning:

Particularly in a US context, where educational options are very strongly influenced by class (and race, in an intertwined manner), riding the xenophobes for misspelling ‘illegals’ as ‘illeagles’, or “Muslim” as “muslin”, what we’re saying is, “You should have been smart enough to get yourself born to the right kind of parents, who’d give you access to the best education, who were educated themselves enough to teach you ‘proper’ English, and who were rich enough to make sure you never had to work after school instead of studying!”

I agree with her position, up to a point. And it’s possibly hypocritical of me to even share her post at all, as I’m given to writing up entire blog posts just to tell people how to use better grammar, but here’s the thing: I’m a writer, and I hang out with other writers. I think writers should know how to spell. I think writers should know their punctuation and conditionals, or be actively trying to improve their skills. And I tend to focus on giving advice on how to do it right, rather than simply declaring, “You don’t know how to spell ‘socialist’, so your argument is invalid,” because I actually do have some awareness that learning the finer points of the English language takes more work for some people than others. I think being able to do things like keep homophones straight and use apostrophes appropriately is an end unto itself, if you’re going to make a habit of writing things which you expect large numbers of people to read.

So that’s where I diverge from CaitieCat’s position: I think writers should have a solid grip on the spelling of whatever language they’re using, and in the examples that I’ve pasted above, we know that these are errors some people make because we’ve seen them on protest signs.